Monday, October 10, 2016

What’s in store for Asia if Trump really wins? Or doesn’t?

Even by
the gladiatorial standards of US presidential elections past, the contrast
between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on foreign policy presents the
American voter with an aberration – a choice between a near-seamless continuity
with America’s core values versus their complete rejection as little more than
a farrago of weakness and inaction stitched together by lily-livered,
out-of-touch elites.

If Trump wins, the Republican
presidential contender has made plain, American foreign policy as we currently
know it would be turned upside down. To judge by his statements alone, trade
deals would be ripped up, longstanding alliances questioned, nuclear
non-proliferation called into question, international humanitarian law flouted,
and tyrants, petty or less so, lauded and apparently rewarded for their shows
of strength where once they would have been shunned or held in watchful
abeyance.

Small wonder that Kurt Campbell,
former assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs and a chief
architect of President Barack Obama’s so-called “Pivot to Asia”, noted on
Thursday at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank in New York, that
the most salient concern he discovered in recent travels across Asia wasn’t the
nuclear provocation of North Korea, nor the growing assertiveness of China, the
potential instability of various Southeast Asian locales, or worries about
slowing economic growth. Instead, he heard a pan-Asian consensus of anxiety at
the spectacle currently unfolding in America.

But let’s say Trump loses. Which,
judging by the most recent polling data, he may. What foreign policy damage
will he have left in his wake? Will Trump’s supporters simply disperse and
vanish? Or has he fired up a new populist movement that will, like the “Tea
Party” activists that emerged in 2009, spawn a generation of like-minded
politicians who will irredeemably change the balance of power in Congress and
ultimately make lasting legislative decisions? Is it possible that the need to
take back votes from Trump, particularly from ambiguous-minded “swing voters”,
might force a radical shift in Hilary Clinton’s long-time support of, say, the
Trans-Pacific Partnership?

In Special Providence,
American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World, the political
theorist Walter Russell Mead argues that American foreign policy has
historically been driven by the interplay of four conflicting schools of
thought. He names them after four presidents and their abiding concerns. Thus
the Hamiltonian prioritises international commerce. The Jeffersonian focuses
domestically, on securing the American democratic system. The Wilsonian is
driven by moral principle and the projection of US values abroad. And finally,
the Jacksonian taps into a populist strain that puts weight on US military
might. Debunking the view that there has been little continuity to American
history, just a series of violent vacillations between isolationists and
internationalists, hawks and doves, Mead writes that each of these schools of
thought acts as a check and balance on the others. Taken together, they’ve
ensured the overarching consensus and fundamental stability that has lain
behind America’s foreign policy success in a chaotic and contingent world.

At the Council on Foreign
Relations on Thursday, Thomas Christensen, who served as George W. Bush’s
deputy secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, pointed out that
much of the foundational work for what the Obama administration rolled out as
its Pivot to Asia actually began under the previous, Republican administration
– including the seeding of the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal and certain
military initiatives. The difference is that, even as America was working
quietly behind the scenes, it had to contend with other political contexts and
global realities.

“People ask me,” said
Christensen, “can you compare how the Bush administration did in Asia and how
the Obama administration is doing in Asia? Usually the motivation behind that
question is to say: When the Bush administration left office, the region was
much more stable and less tension-ridden than it is today, therefore the Bush
administration did a better job. And I reject that, because I think that the
China we had to deal with in the Bush administration was a very different China
than the one that the Obama administration has had to deal with.”

If Trump loses, President Hillary
Clinton’s foreign policy is unlikely to be much affected. Compounding her own
deep familiarity with politics and diplomacy, including her four-year tenure as
Obama’s first secretary of state, she will have no trouble attracting into her
administration a seasoned team of foreign policy experts, doubtless with
Democratic leanings but who will be well placed to deal with unforeseen
developments abroad (a tsunami, a coup, an economic disaster). For four years,
possibly eight, she will present a bulwark against any of the lasting damage of
Trump’s campaign.

But if Mead’s thesis holds, there
is a sense in which Trump’s rise and eventual defeat can’t entirely be ignored,
even as his political moment is swallowed into the shape-shifting fabric of the
American system. After all, Trump isn’t the cause of the populist strain he has
fanned in US politics – he’s just the most effective embodiment of it, for now.
Homo Trumpus is a species of American with many different attributes, fears and
aspirations. Though some among them are undeniably attracted to Trump’s
outright bigotry, misogyny and statements of petty cruelty, others excuse that
as refreshing attacks on “political correctness”.

To many he represents a rejection
of an establishment that they feel hasn’t adequately addressed the changing
circumstances of their lives. Ironically, Trump, the billionaire hotel magnate
and notoriously philandering New York socialite, has tapped into a deeply
conservative Jacksonian impulse, including a core of white, working-class men
who should find in him little reflection. Meanwhile, Clinton, the self-made
daughter of a small-business owner, is painted as the arch-incarnation of the
Washington elite.

But if the measure of American
foreign policy has been its fundamental resilience and its tendency to stay the
course, then with the loss of Trump, people can again, perhaps, sleep easy in
Asia. As Kurt Campbell put it at the Council on Foreign Relations, speaking of
Obama’s initiatives: “I will say that the hope was not to suggest that this was
different than Republicans, that it was a continuity largely, because basically
everything that we’ve done in Asia has generally been bipartisan. I don’t know
what bipartisan is going to mean anymore.”

A former
Asia correspondent for The Washington Post, Delphine Schrank is the author of
The Rebel of Rangoon: A Tale of Defiance and Deliverance in Burma